Unscrambling Africa: From Eurafrican Technopolitics to the Fascist New Order

Abstract

This article examines how German technocrats created revisionist plans to “unscramble” Africa in the 1930s. In particular, it studies how their schemes emerged from the transnational Eurafrican movement in the interwar period. The mixture of technical expertise and imperial ideologies in Eurafrican planning made Eurafricanism remarkably elastic in political terms, connecting liberal democratic and fascist states in the interwar era. Bureaucrats and colonial thinkers in Nazi Germany helped produce such projects, but also oriented them toward the realization of fascist imperial goals, using Eurafricanism as a tool of territorial revisionism. As a result, the technopolitics of African infrastructure development both depended on and informed the knowledge and ideology that defined fascist geopolitics. Although these blueprints never came to fruition, they point to the importance of spatial categories and technopolitical actors in the ideology and practice of National Socialism. Further, Nazi planners’ engagement with Eurafricanism indicates how interwar imperialism connected Nazi Germany to other imperial powers in Europe.